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Tapeless Prosumer Workflow
I’m in charge of planning the production workflow for a news program here in Peru. There are 4 words that I have to have in mind: Cheap, tapeless, Avid and cheap.
The thing is that I want Media Composer to be the editing solution. The only problem is which camera. We work with video-reporters. The journalists make their own shots so we’ve been using consumer handycams because of the small size and the ease of use (and also price, of course). In past projects, we’ve been using miniDV but on this project we want to go tapeless.
The question then is very simple: has anyone managed to get any of the consumer tapless cameras to work natively with MC?
I know i can transcode the video, but we’re talking about news, so time is very important.
I know that consumer cameras aren’t the best choice in terms of image quality, but they are the best choice when you hace to just keep them in you backpack ans shoot something quickly… and of course, it hurts less when you damage it in extreme situations.
I’ve also read that Avid still doesn’t support AVCHD, but nowadays there are a lot of new camera models with new codecs support. For example, in Sony’s website I’ve read that the Sony Webbie records in mp4. I’ve imported mp4 transcoded from an avi file with no problems, but I haven’t tried with an actual file from the Webbie camera (of course, I think the webbie camera is a little “too consumer”).
Has anibody tried the SonyHDR-XR500V??? I see that it can shoot in SD/mpeg2. I think it makes .m2t files??? Has anybody tried to import this to MC?
I also read that when a mp4 file generated by the Sony Webbie is imported into Adobe Premiere CS4, it recognizes it as an xdcam ex file…
PS-1: We don’t care much about HD. Here in Peru we’re still very far from HDTV.
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1 Reply
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Hi there,
I work at a community access station in Pennsylvania and though we do not hit the deadlines you do, we still have to do things on a relatively cheaper end. We edit on Avid Media Composer 2.8.1 and to keep things tape-less we are using the p2 technology of Panasonic. Now I believe Panasonic p2 records in an MXF format (I could be wrong). But there is absolutely no transcode time to import newly shot footage. Yes, it is a cost in the beginning for p2 but you will never have to buy tapes again. The most time it can take, is when you have to transport from p2 card to hard drive, but if you have a memory card recorder you can slip in the card and edit straight from the card.
I know this seems a little unclear. But I hope it helped a little.
Ryan McAfee
Ryan McAfee
Moon Community Access Television
http://www.mca-tv.com
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